Ports of Call

It is the middle of the trip and we have a very early morning as you can tell from the “Ship’s Time” above. Most people aboard are getting ready to visit ROME., but not us. I had looked at this months ago and was already a bit put off by the 1 1/2 – 2 hours EACH WAY to get back and forth. There is no question about wanting to experience Rome, but a few hours on a tour bus, crammed between hours on a bus or train ride both ways wasn’t “blowing my skirt up” (and I can say that… please see “Formal Night” with any questions). We’ll come back and give Rome a few days some other time.

Here’s another reason… It Unification Day.. their 150th… and it’s a pretty big deal. I’m told it is similar in importance to our (USA) Independence Day (Fourth of July). Later on we heard from some folks that went it that it made for easier transportation since it wasn’t a ‘regular’ business day. With officials from many countries coming to Rome for the celebration (US Vice President Joe Biden for instance) I just didn’t feel like rolling those dice.

…So we opted to go the other way (see map below). We decided to take the”Italian Countryside and Olive Oil” tour to the medieval town of Tarquinia and then off to the Tuscany region to visit an olive oil farm and enjoy fresh olives, extra virgin olive oil, bruschetta and other local foods for lunch. This should put us back aboard the Magic by mid-afternoon instead of 8PM…

This is the local map of the historical district of this medieval, walled city. I would have liked to see the painted tombs of the Etruscans from the 7th century BCE but unfortunately they are not open to general public at this time. They were recently declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Here’s more information on that… check the very few gallery pictures: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1158/

The shot below here is by one of the seven entrances to the walled city and it right by the “You Are Here” portion of the site map above.

…and this is actually where we got off the buss… it’s right where the very tiny blue P for parking is. It gives you a sense of just how large this place is.

Our guide today is actually a resident of this town. With it being Unification Day, many things are not operating normally… lot’s of people have gone to the town hall to hear the mayor speak and there’s a parade due to go though later. Our guide asked if we’d like to see a few things ‘not on the regular tour’ as a result.

”Yes Please!”

So she went up a set of stone steps stuck on the outside of a building and knocked on a small wooden door. A bit of conversation later and a gentleman came out with her and we wen to the side door of this church.

We are told that this is no longer actually a consecrated church, but is used for many celebrations and receptions and the like.

After spending some time in here we are offered an additional opportunity to see something ‘not on the tour’ and climb up a very narrow stairway up the back of the far wall of the city and emerge on top of the city walls, looking out at what you see below…

This picture that took a bit of doing to assemble. This is a panoramic shot was actually 5 separate photos I took and then ‘stitched’ together using a photo compositing tool from Microsoft called ICE. I’ve uploaded the full resolution photo at 10,570 x 2,437 so if you click on the thumbnail below you can get the full-size picture (11MB) and visit some of the beautiful details of the this picturesque landscape… rather breathtaking I thought

If you look closely in the wide shot above on the far left you can just make out the lens hood from Renée’s camera. I think this picture is just as breathtaking!

As a final perspective, we were able to climb one more level up a curving, narrow staircase inside a round tower on the wall to the very top. Here’s a picture, looking down through one of the crenellations onto the plaza and the church we visited earlier:

A more modern church in the main square. There’s an engraving indicating it was restored in 1930 and is dedicated to Saint Margarita

A bit more time and then it’s off to the “Canino” region of Olive Oil country and our yummy early afternoon luncheon

Another classy photo through the bus window as we turned off to the farm

Our hostess at Cerrosughero Olive Farm. She explains how the trees are developed and the olives harvested. It not in the video but I hear for the first time that green olives and black olives come from the same olive tree, just a different times of the year.

Cerrosughero Olive Oil Tour

This place was mostly about the awesome, fresh food served for our lunch. Indescribably delicious!!

I have no other photos of worth for the olive farm and Renée is still sifting through many thousands, so if she has some worthy one to post I’ll place an update.

We heartily recommend this tour for anyone not going to Rome.

We had such a relaxed and enjoyable day, saw unexpected sights, enjoyed each others company, and spent the last few hours before dinner sprawled on the deck by the pool with a nice chianti.

No port tomorrow… it’s a day floating ‘at sea’ between here and La Spezia

When we last left our heroes, the were leaving Sorrento in the rain, hoping that they had gotten their 30% chance out of the way…

No Such Luck! The intrepid ‘Family’ of Tour Guide Julia, popped their umbrellas, and donned the very stylish and fashionable ‘Purple Trenchcoat’ that is all the rage of the Pompeii circuit… at least according to the street vendors at the facility entrance. These lovely 5-Euro items are designed as the ultimate in biodegradable wear, as they immediately begin to shred as soon as they are worn.

The ruins of this Roman city from 79AD are rather spectacular. I’d expected something with columns and some buildings and such, but this places SPRAWLS over a large territory. As Julia tells it, the city was actually a port town on the Mediterranean. As you may have noticed from the prior map, it’s now about 5 kilometers inland. This is not due to the seas sinking but rather the huge volume of volcanic ash and material that settled over the area in a few days and raised the land well above the sea where it remains today.

It’s raining pretty steadily here so most of the time Renée had her camera safely Ziploc-ed away. Most of these photos I captured with the camera on my trusty iPhone4, so please excuse the rather poor quality.

Here, to open the section of photos, is one that Renée captured during a brief respite in the rain:

The approach to the small gladiatorial stadium, seen in the offing:

Here we are standing in the center of the stadium. The seating has been renovated for actual use in years past, but not any longer. At the lowest levels, where the wealthiest would sit, you can still see the carved marble seats and steps. And guess what? It’s still raining!!

This is a close-up of one of the main entry streets. It lead down to the harbor. These streets were open gutters/sewers that carried the city waste out and down to the sea. These raised stones are at the level of the walkways on either side of the ‘street’ so people could walk across without having to step in the muck. The spacing of the stones was designed to easily allow chariots and carts to pass up and down to the port. You an clearly see the worn groove of those iron-shod wheels from 2,000 years ago. Cool!!

Guess what this building below used to be for?

If you said ‘bakery’ you win a prize! Sure, sure, it just *looks* like they had large, brick ovens. How do they *know* it was a bakery?

Unlike most ruins, this one spent 1,900 years buried in volcanic ash. When they dug the place out they founds THOUSANDS of loaves of bread in this and other bakeries around the city. They were more ‘toast’ than bread, but there was no doubt about it… I wonder if they made pizzas here on weekends?

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This was one of the people on our tour group. As you can see he also had donned one of the “PURPLE TRENCHCOATS”. He was shooting pics with his Nikon and trying to keep it under cover in-between… brave soul!

BTW: The inscription on the wall is not part of the original building but was placed there in past years. It reads (if my Latin is any good at all…) “House built in the second year of Augustus”… or something similar.

Looks like in-town accommodations were rather small

More pictures along the way…

…still raining

As this was the ‘Adults Only’ tour, our guide took us to one of the more unusual areas of the city. Just off the main port road we saw earlier was a series of smallish rooms like this one pictured below. Here you can see a local neighborhood German Shepherd has spotted a likely location out of the rain for a nap. This was one of a number of pups we saw during our travels. They were all collared and tagged and evidently belonged to folks that lived near the ruins.

So the archeologists weren’t certain what these rooms with a rather permanent bed-looking area were..

…until they started cleaning up the frescos that were still painted on the walls above the doors…

It turns out this was the the city’s brothel area, conveniently located near the harbor. Since this was an extremely busy port that served many different cultures, there were many different languages spoken by the sailors and merchants. The frescos made it easy to select what… ummmm… services you wanted. It was kind of like going into a McDonalds in another country, just point at the picture of the Big Mac and you knew what you were buying.

It was a busy street!

By the way, notice what looks like a pipe revealed in the stone to the right of the street scene above? This is actually a water pipe ‘main’ that server water to the homes throughout the city. When archeologists first examined these pipes, the found they were made of LEAD. Egads! They speculated that this might have been the cause of many of the dead in the city before they knew more about the actual history. On further examination, it was found that the water was so ‘hard’ that it coated the inner portion of the lead pipes with a solid wall of calcium, completely insulating the water from the lead and making it quite safe. Talk about lucky!

This mosaic floor is at the entrance to one home, I really liked it and didn’t see something similar elsewhere as we walked through the city.

Every once in awhile, you get lucky.This is an iPhone4 picture I shot of part of the central plazas of Pompeii. It’s still raining, but it’s finally letting up a bit.

The mountain you see in the background just breaking free of the clouds is Vesuvius… imagine what it looked like.. THREE TIMES HIGHER than today!

One of the casts made of the many found in the ash 20 feet deep. They died from inhaling the poison gas from the volcano and were covered up in less than 4 days to a depth of 20 feet or more. This is not an actual ‘body’ The heat and corrosive environment of the ash incinerated the bodies after they were trapped, leaving cavities in the cooling mass in the exact form of the person or animal. Once this was realized, they poured a casting material into the cavities to create these impressions of the people who perished.

This was one on many of the wall frescos that are still in place throughout the city (outside the brothel).

This is one of a number of storehouses and restoration shops thy discovered as the city was uncovered. As they learned more and more about the history of Pompeii they realized why places like this were found, and why so many were found dead here. A couple years before the eruption in 79AD there was a sever earthquake that caused a lot of damage to the city. Many of the residents relocated to other villas they had elsewhere and left the rebuilding and repair and renovation of Pompeii to slaves and artisans. …and those were the people that were there when the mountain blew up.

The second picture is of a dog, restored in a similar fashion the way the person was earlier. I flipped the picture over to make it a bit easier to see the shape of the dog.

A couple final parting shots as we exit Pompeii and the rain lessens further…

One final picture from Renée of a section from the central plaza of Pompeii. It provides a sense of the huge scale of the place… look carefully (try clicking on the pic to get it in a viewer where you can zoom in) under the archway and you’ll see a few umbrellas and one of the lovely purple trenchcoats.

As we climb aboard the #19 bus to take us back to the ship, I’m still stunned at the scope and… reality… of Pompeii. Even in the rain it was an awesome adventure!!

As we ride back towards ‘home’ it… stops… raining, and the sun comes out!

I then look at my watch and realize I’ve missed the start of Captain Jack in the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie already. It’s showing in the Walt Disney Theater in 3D. There’s another showing late tonight but I don’t want to disturb the other patrons by snoring loudly through the back half of the film.

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One final photo from Renée that she captured as we sailed away from Napoli… what a beauty shot!

Early in the morning as we approach the Port of Naples, the remains of Mt. Vesuvius dominates the horizon as I look eastward from the veranda of our room:

It’s 8:00am now… we have visited the COVE CAFÉ (or at least *I* have) and brought back a large latte for Renée and I am enjoying a triple-shot Americano. We have a cloudy day and about 72 degrees expected for a high temperature. The weather forecast from the bridge is a little uncertain for today with a bit of a chance for rain.

We have a double tour today, first we are off to the lovely city of Sorrento near the Amalfi Coast and then to the ruins of Pompeii. Although we didn’t know it at the time, here’s what the geography of the trip looked like. We would leave from the port at 8:30, drive around the foothills of Mt. Vesuvius, past Pompeii and along the coastal highway until we reached the city of Sorrento. After lunch, we would return the way we came and go to Pompeii for the afternoon and return to the ship late in the day

Here’s the scale of this picture courtesy of Google Maps

Driving directions to Piazza Tasso (Central Sorrento)

1 hour 9 mins A3 and SS145 51.6 km

…something to keep in mind, often nothing is close to the ports!

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Since Renee is carrying some really expensive photography gear and my DSLR camera is not very weather-resistant, I’m toting my KATA R-103 backpack which is fitted out with sectioned, padded areas for cameras, lenses, etc. It’s moderately weather resistant and has an additional rain-proof sleeve that can be used if needed. Better safe than sorry. These are stock shots to give you an idea…

Occasionally you’ll get to see some really superior photos. I’ll call them out when they appear. These are taken by Renée with some pretty sweet equipment.

I’ll have a special posting of camera pr0n when my Kung Fu is better…later on

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Here’s a shot of Vesuvius I took through the bus window as we drove past it towards Sorrento. Things are looking a bit ominous!

As we neared Sorrento, our lovely tour guide ‘Julia’ arranged for us to pull off the winding two-lane road that was working down the cliff-side towards the city. It offered some interesting shots, which I did a lousy job of capturing. Renée’s will be much better… but they aren’t ‘ready’ yet (smack!) ow!!

The Hotel Mega Marewas off to the right of this little look-out

…and this was below it. It seemed somebody had a bad idea for this location, whatever it was supposed to be.

Renée caught this rather spectacular vision of that hotel hanging off the cliff-side:

It’s just starting to spatter some rain, so it’s back into the bus and head down the road to Sorrento:

Julia, our tour guide, calls us ‘her family’ and gathers us all together as we get off the bus to make sure we know where and when to meet. This is an ‘on your own’ tour, which we like. The service gets us reliably back a forth to the destinations, but doesn’t clutter up our time for soaking up the local flavor. She offers to walk us down to the beach entrance so we can see the Mediterranean from here. This is an awesome shot Renée took, looking back at the cliff-side we stopped on above. It’s about halfway up the slope and off to the left of the hill you see in the offing.

As you can see it’s already raining back where we came from and looking a bit threatening here.

After a bit of gawking about, Julia points out the way to the center of the town and then we were off…

…just as it started pouring-down rain! The skies opened up on us at this point. I’d already secured my less durable camera in the KATA and stopped to wrap it’s ‘raincoat’ onto the backpack. Renée has planned ahead and brought a large Ziploc bag in her shoulder bag, so she shoves her Nikon into it. She had also thought to bring a Totes umbrella, clever girl!

A few vendors saw an opportunity and stuck small boxes of little, collapsible umbrellas out. 3€ later I am the proud owner of a floppy, but rather serviceable, rainbow umbrella.

Things started getting a bit too wet even for Rene’s camera!

So now we were off to see the town. Due to the rain, there’s little evidence of this part of the trip, but we had a fun time walking through this picturesque place filled with folks going about their regular midday lives.

We decided to find a place to grab some lunch. We knew we had about an hour and it was starting to rain even more with a rumble of thunder in the offing. Renée navigated us to the city square and spotted a little pizzeria with outdoor seating tucked under an awning. We dove across the street and slid into a seat. Unfortunately the seam for the awning was right where I sat down and it kept squirting me in the back every once in awhile. Not that I wasn’t already pretty wet, but still… Our server came by and we asked if there was a drier seat available and he offered us a snug place towards the back.

Piazza Tasso courtesy of Street view on Google Maps. This would be standing at the square looking back towards Pizzeria Aurora where we had just been seated. We ate just under the awning a couple table behind the maître d’

We knew we were staying for a leisurely lunch and have learned not to be in a rush when eating in most places in Europe. I saw more people spoil either a pleasant atmosphere or an otherwise great meal by being pushy and impatient. Slow down a bit, relax, enjoy your holiday!

…and if you can’t, please stop following me around

We asked our server for a bottle of a local red and thoroughly enjoyed this one:

I had a slice and wished I’d ordered a pie for myself. Thin, but not crunchy-crispy crust, olive oil, basil, the ‘sauce’ was nobody’s paste from a jar. It smelled and tasted like crushed, fresh tomatoes… just… tomatoes, and finally the most delicious buffalo mozzarella in small slabs, just melted enough.

MMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!

So while we are drooling over the pizza and sipping this nice local wine, it’s still pouring down rain. By this point there’s thunder and lightning and WOW! I glance over to my right were a couple has just stepped under the awning awaiting a table and become very envious of this great umbrella this guy is carrying.

“Renée! Check out this really nice golf umbrella. This white one with a Disney Cruise Lines logo on it. I wonder if I can get one aboard ship?”

I look up just as the server is coming to seat them… and it’s Captain John!!!, Master of the Disney Magic along with his wife who is sailing with him on this first trip in the Med for him. Egads! We greeted him and he recalled us from the formal night, as I was apparently the only one in a kilt aboard this entire ship, imagine that! We chatted for just a minute and then let them head in to their table. With all the places to go to, they decided to come an hour and a half out from the ship to this little restaurant. Guess we picked the right place to eat!I hope they had a bit of anonymity to enjoy a meal ashore. And I still want an umbrella like his!

It was lovely, but we had to make our way back to the meeting place for the bus ride to Pompeii. The rain had eased up a tad but was still coming down as we walked back. On our way back, Renée caught this nice shot from under the umbrellas:

Our second port of call, this was a replacement for Tunis, Tunisia following the turmoil in that region in the early part of 2011. I was still disappointed though we understood the reasons. I had really looked forward to seeing the historic ruins of Carthage as well as stepping onto the continent of Africa… rats!

We planned to do a whole lot of nothing today. There was not much that excited us to hop on a bus and go off to see and the weather was spectacular (75F/24C and Sunny)

Renee did get off long enough to shoot some pictures near our berth in the port of Palermo,

There are. perhaps, more points of interest on the eastern shore of Sicily but this location was too far to visit Etna for instance..

Here’s a couple links that may be of interest to those on upcoming Mediterranean cruises:

All-in-all this was the ugliest, most industrial port I recall being in during the trip. We berthed next to a monstrous grain (I think) storage facility.

I really enjoy the smarty-pants humor Renee has.

She spotted the fact that the Disney Magic had berthed in a no-parking zone with 24-hour towing

Here, we can see that they need to get a bigger tow-truck. I think they were trying to put a boot on the anchor until they could find one…

Since that didn’t seem to be working………

At about Noon, Captain John had to come on the public-address system to advise his crew that they needed to be prepared to remain aboard for safety inspections (that went over well <sarcasm>). We heard from some sources later that this was very unusual to have to announce it publicly. It turned out that the Italian authorities had popped a surprise safety drill on the ship and were requiring all the port-side lifeboats to be run out and for the crew to actually lower a couple away, crew them, drive them about and recover them! While they have the authority to do this, it’s really rare to call for it in such a fashion. We think the tow-truck incident played a role…